This first week our professor Nick Savy introduced us to Maya and got us familiar with the UI. As part of our practice to familiarize ourselves with Maya’s tools and shortcuts he had us produce a model of a Tesla Cybertruck. We worked our way through modeling, texturing and some compositing work.
Later in the week I also produced in my off time a model for a chair with a wicker seat. I chose this is a chair’s rectangular frame would be simple enough with polygon cubes to create and let me further familiarize myself with Maya’s UI and shortcuts with the wicker seat adding a new challenge in creating the crisscrossed pattern and the open face of the chair.
To create the open face of the chair I had the idea to make a standard cube as the chair’s seat, then using the insert edges function I mapped out the interior of the seat making it a separate face from the rest of the cube and simply deleted it. While this had the affect of creating the hole it left the edges open without a face. A friend told me about the bridge tool so using that I simply bridged those edges and closed the faces creating the hollow cube that I then placed the wicker inside of which I created by smoothing multiple thing rectangles that I then merged into a single object.
I added an object to it and using the soft pull feature of Maya I bent the wicker giving it the illusion of having the weight of the object on it.
Lastly on Friday with the aid of a tutorial I modeled a vase with the help of a YouTube tutorial that got me familiar with the Curves and Surfaces tools such as EP Curve tool and Revolve.